


recovery

by v3ilfire



Series: i fought the war, but the war won [8]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-10-09
Packaged: 2018-04-25 12:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4961467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v3ilfire/pseuds/v3ilfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most would expect at least one terrible joke to soften the blow of her condition; but it seems that even Hawke could be grossly overestimated. It was the only reminder anyone had that she was, after all, just human. It’s a shame that all of Kirkwall did not seem to get that memo.</p><p>She was a wisp of herself, lingering somewhere between asleep and dead. The healers had kept her suspended in a constant veil of magic for a solid month, which seemed the bare-minimum requirement for piecing together a woman who had nearly been split into two equal halves by a sword nearly as wide as herself. Consistently sedated, she was kept alive on broth and prayer alone, though to whose god, no one knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	recovery

A woman fainted.

Hesta would have laughed about that, though prospects for humor were looking grim at best as she kicked feebly at the Arishok’s head, his blade effectively skewering her through the midsection. The sight of her blood running hot and fast down his arm was a surreal one; the sheer amount of it nearly distracted her from the task at hand.

The pillar greeted her back with a loud crack and a terse thud, her body leaving a bright red smear across the stone as she flopped to the ground. She was too dizzy to figure out just where the hell she’d ended up, especially given that up and down ceased making sense entirely. She could have been thrown to the ceiling, for all she knew, and left to dangle from the Viscount’s chandelier.

Hesta’s arms shook in an attempt to lift herself off the floor (or ceiling), but she quickly realized that during any movement her stomach felt hot and raw with a searing pain the likes of which she had never thought she’d know. She could taste her own blood pooling in her mouth, coming up from Maker knew where in an ungodly rush. Frankly, she thought the whole thing an unpleasant time, and could think of at least three other near-death experiences she’d rather put herself through again.

And she was dying. There was no clear, ‘this is it’ moment; no venturing towards any light, or Chantry sisters singing, or a fountain of golden virgins or whatever was supposed to happen. Just stars dancing at the edge of her vision, and some noblewoman’s hysterics.

“Do you yield, Hawke?”

The offer was tempting, to say the least. Moving was both difficult and unappealing, and every passing second seemed to rid her of a flagon’s worth of blood. She would be the fourth in the Hawke legacy of dying before their time; starting with her father in Lothering, Carver during their escape, her mother barely even three weeks ago.

And then, three things hit Hesta at the same time: she did not _want_ to die, she _refused_ to let Bethany be the last Hawke, and of course, she remembered Saarebas.

She’d sooner chop her own head off than let anyone collar her sister.

There was little time for her to notice the crowd’s collective gasp. She pushed herself to her knees through sheer willpower, and let adrenaline take her to her feet. There was a wobble during which her stomach lurched, but she caught herself on the pillar. Glaring at the Arishok, she spit out more blood than she thought was in her mouth, glassy-eyes and indignant.

“No.”

Thanks to Hawke’s earlier efforts, the Arishok himself was also in fairly dreadful shape. She could barely see him past a vague outline of his form, but it would have to be enough. They were both one strike away from being felled, if that. The Arishok, clearly ignoring this fact, lifted his sword, and began to charge at her again.

She had one shot.

The Arishok’s charge was less than a second from impact when Hesta drew a smoke bomb from her belt and chucked it right at his foot. He flew forward from a furry of grey smoke and landed on his shoulder with a sickening crunch. He rolled onto his back in an attempt to reach for his sword, but Hesta flopped on top of him with all her body weight, dagger poised. The blade entered his neck unceremoniously, held by little more than a vague hope for winning.

He stared at her, gurgling each time he breathed.  
“One day,” he breathed, “we shall… return…”  
Hesta yanked the blade towards herself, and watched his eyes roll into the back of his head.

Her vision went black as someone called her name.

\---

“Wait a second, Blondie!”   
“She’s _dying_ , Varric!”  
“Wouldn’t it be a shame if she died because you were stupid enough to get caught by Templars?”

Anders shut his mouth and dropped his protests. Aveline lead their charge, opening doors and clearing debris. Fenris flew after her with Hesta in his bloodied arms, Varric and Merrill at his side and Anders trailing just behind. Sebastian had stayed in the Keep to help Meredith clear out the nobles and count their dead, and Isabela was gone before anyone had been the wiser.

The rest of their group burst into the Hawke estate unceremoniously, with Bodhan on his way to greet them when he saw his employer’s condition.  
“Oh! Lay her down in the parlor, I will ... I will go get hot water! Oh, this is _terrible_ \- Sandal, my boy!”

Fenris broke into the lead and lay Hawke down in the parlor, as instructed. Before he could move fully out of the way, Anders’ hands began to burn so bright that they lit the whole room an electric blue. He rushed towards Hawke and pressed his hands to her midsection, blood bubbling up immediately between his fingers.  

“Be careful, Anders!” Merrill said, her voice shaky from holding back tears.   
“If I don’t do this, she dies,” he spat back.

And, by the looks of her, she wasn’t a long ways off.

There were four solid minutes of nothing but Bodhan’s rushing about and Merrill’s whimpering, and then someone began pounding on the door.

“I’ll get it,” Aveline said, and ran off to greet their uninvited guests. Varric moved to listen in.

“Ah, _Knight-Commander_ ,” Aveline said, just a little too loudly. It was hint enough.

“Alright, Blondie, Daisy, you’ve gotta go.”  
“Not until I finish this.”   
“If you stay here, you won’t get to finish anything, and Hawke will die in prison for aiding and abetting two apostates. The cellar leads to Darktown, now _get out_.”

Merrill had to drag Anders away from his work, but they managed to slip out just as Meredith entered the room. She surveyed the space like she could smell unlawful magic, but Hesta’s ragged breathing quickly caught her attention, to everyone’s relief.  
“Orsino volunteered some of Kirkwall’s finest healers for the Champion. I have brought them and a small party of Templars as escorts. We thought it the least we could do in order to repay her, and it seems we are just in time.”

And so began the first of two months during which no one entered or exited the Hawke estate without Meredith’s explicit approval.

\---

Aveline fell into the chair opposite Varric with a heavy sigh, as was her routine in recent weeks. The Hanged Man was little respite for anyone, members of their group filtering in and out to touch base with Varric, get any scrap of news they could out of him. They usually left disappointed.  
“Still no?”   
“They’re still there, so she must still be alive. But Meredith won’t let anyone in or out that isn’t a Templar or a Circle mage.”

Varric shook his head. They had been trying to schedule a visit for the last three weeks, but each time Aveline made the appeal, Meredith would reportedly shake her head with her dutifully regretful expression, and say that Hawke was still just too weak to see anyone but immediate kin.

Hilariously enough, both Bethany and Gamlen had their appeals rejected, as well.

“I did find out that Meredith intends to name her Champion of Kirkwall,” Aveline continued, her grin humorless.  

“Oh, yeah? At whose urging?”  
“The entire nobility, apparently.”

“I’m sure she’ll just love that when she wakes up.”

 _If_ she wakes up.

\---

Aveline had conned Fenris into helping the clean-up in Hightown, under the guise of owing her a handsome debt for changing the patrols for the last several years. It went far faster and easier than the mess in dodgier parts of the city, he noticed, not to any surprise. The nobility was surprisingly grateful, though he couldn’t help but think that he owed that to the Amell crest at his hip, the red scarf about his wrist. They were grateful to Hawke. They remembered who lifted her battered body and ran for dear life.

Each time he passed the Hawke estate, Fenris couldn’t help but look to the two stern-looking Templars guarding the door. Sometimes he caught flickers of magic light through the window upstairs. There was no relief in the sight of it, only a clenching in his stomach.

He did not want their last conversation to have been as grim as it was. She deserved better than to spend her last days broken and hollow, holding her life as forfeit to fate. She deserved better than what he gave her, and yet all he wanted was to let her know how important she was. There was much more to tell her than his clumsy condolences.

( _“I don’t know what to say, but… I am here.”_  
 _“Just say something. Anything.”_  
 _“They say… death is only a journey. Does that help?”_ )

Fenris found himself less prepared to lose her than he thought he would be.

( _“It just raises questions. Journey to where?”_  
 _“I don’t know. It’s just something people say.”_  
_Her laugh was a cold bark, humorless and grating against her throat._  
_“Well, I’m sure I’ll be the next Hawke to find out.”  
__He sat down next to her, and the moment she felt the weight of his hand on her back, began to cry._ )  

\---

It took another two weeks for Aveline to secure permission to visit.

The healer than Orsino had put in charge of the whole operation - a red-headed woman who clearly hadn’t slept properly in weeks - stood in the parlor with her shaking hands fidgeting in front of her. A Templar gave her the most impressively consistent side-eye that Varric had ever seen.  
“Only two people in at a time, and -- I must warn you, she isn’t -- she hallucinates quite a bit. We were able to reduce the magical treatments, but the potions she takes for the pain are quite … strong. There were more breaks and lacerations than I thought a human body could handle, and she lost so much blood, I never -- well, that’s all shop talk, and -- well, as I was saying, you probably won’t get more than three sentences out of her.”

Aveline and Merrill went in first, the younger woman bubbling with excitement and brimming with stories to tell. They returned twenty minutes later, Aveline stone-faced and clenching her jaw, and Merrill on the brink of tears.

“Who’s next?” the healer said, clearly unsurprised by the scenario.

Varric and Fenris exchanged looks - with Isabela still missing and Sebastian busy with Chantry-backed restoration efforts in the poorer districts, they were the only ones left. Bethany, to their knowledge, was still forbidden from knowing anything of her sister’s fate. Gamlen had given up on asking Meredith for permission.

“Alright, elf. Let’s go.”

Fenris had never seen Varric rendered speechless before.

(Even in the book, all he had to say was that Hawke was, “a wisp of herself, lingering somewhere between asleep and dead.” He wasn’t entirely wrong.)

The first thing they noticed was that her skin looked white. Not the type of pale they made fun of her for, with a healthy flush in her cheeks and pale freckles littering the places where the sun touched most often, but lost-among-the-sheets, one-foot-in-the-grave white. Her eyes were sunken in as deep as her cheeks, her arms thin and atrophied, hands bony. They would have thought her dead if not for the ragged sound of her breathing.

( _“Most would expect at least one terrible joke to soften the blow of her condition; but it seems that even Hawke could be grossly overestimated. It was the only reminder anyone had that she was, after all, just human. It’s a shame that all of Kirkwall did not seem to get that memo._

_She was a wisp of herself, lingering somewhere between asleep and dead. The healers had kept her suspended in a constant veil of magic for a solid month, which seemed the bare-minimum requirement for piecing together a woman who had nearly been split into two equal halves by a sword nearly as wide as herself. Consistently sedated, she was kept alive on broth and prayer alone, though to whose god, no one knew._

_A month beforehand, all of Lowtown had seen her slam a man twice her size into the ground with such force, his arm dislocated on impact. Lying there in her bed, she could probably hardly slam a leaf. The only comfort anyone had was seeing her faithful hound curled up at her feet._

_The elf had never looked so scared before, not within the city’s walls.”_ )

Varric walked to the bedside first, extending a hand towards the dog, who pressed his dry nose into the dwarf’s calloused palm with a sorry whine.   
“She’s pretty shit company right now, isn’t she?”  
Nug exhaled and set his hand back down on Hesta’s lap, looking to Varric and Fenris in turn with big, sad eyes.

There was a hitch in Hawke’s breath, and her brow furrowed. The dog perked up immediately, his stub of a tail wiggling with some semblance of hope. Varric didn’t realize he had stopped breathing until her eyes opened and he exhaled.

“I heard that,” she muttered, her voice crackling. Nug took the moment to nudge her hand with his nose until she lifted it just enough to him to fit his head underneath. “Hi, boy.”

Fenris lingered towards the back of the room, safely out of Hesta’s line of sight. All the things he thought he had to say vanished the moment he crossed the threshold of her bedroom. Luckily for him, she closed her eyes nearly as fast as she opened them. He found no comfort in the sound of her voice, so weak he could barely hear her.

“How long have I been out?”  
“Six, seven weeks?”   
“What a lovely nap. Have I missed much?”  
Varric laughed, though the sound died quickly.   
“We’ve postponed Wicked Grace for you. Think of it as an act of mercy - we don’t want to train Merrill to kick your ass too hard without you available to defend your honor.”

There was no response. Hesta was asleep again - the healer was not kidding when she said that more than three sentences would be a doubtful achievement. Fenris sighed just as Varric turned to leave the room.

“Come on, elf. Let’s let her rest.”

Fenris was already out the door when she spoke again.   
“Wait.”

Varric turned, but did not move back towards the bed. Hesta’s eyes were open, but glassy, unfocused. He couldn’t even tell if she was looking at him.  
“Where have you been?”

Fenris looked to the dwarf, but for once, even he was without answers. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again, to wait.

“I thought you were dead. Where did you go? Maker, everything -- everything’s gone to shit. Why didn’t you help? Carver could have -- we would still --”

The healer had bustled up the stairs just as Hawke began to lose her breath to silent sobs, her eyes welling up with tears. The woman sighed and made a beeline past the shocked-still men who stood in her way.

“Oh, not _again_. Why didn’t you call me up? Come now, Miss Hawke, it’s time to go back to sleep.”

She sprinkled a powder in Hesta’s face, and immediately her head lulled to the side again, eyes still half-open and tears running freely down her gaunt cheeks. Varric and Fenris had to be escorted downstairs by Templars, or else they would have been moored by shock for the rest of the night.

\---

Two weeks later, Fenris noticed that the Templars at the estate were gone from their posts.

He dared not approach.

\---

Aveline was surprised to find Bodhan in good spirits the next time she came to visit. The templars and mages had cleared out, and evidently both he and Orana took to cleaning the entire house.

“You look well, Bodhan.”   
“Thank you, Captain! Messere seems to be feeling better, so we are doing what we do best.”  
The Guard-Captain cracked a smile, a flash of genuine happiness gracing her worn expression for a fleeting moment.  
“Is she awake?”   
“She was awake for breakfast earlier! I’m sure Messere wouldn’t mind a visitor.”

And so Aveline climbed the stairs, not daring to hope for more than she had seen just three weeks beforehand. Surprisingly, the bed was empty.

“Hawke?”  
“A little help,” came the response from the direction of the privy. Hesta was on her knees in the doorway, bundled up in fresh sleep clothes and her crimson robe, still rail-thin and pale but awake.   
“Are you supposed to be walking?” Aveline asked as she pulled her up by the arm. Her question was answered when she saw blood pooling over the hand that Hawke held pressed to her midsection.  
“Don’t give me that look, Aveline.”   
“ _Hawke_.”  
“ _Don’t_ , Aveline, please.”  
“Hawke, you are just going to make things worse. You need to be more careful.” 

Hesta rolled her eyes as she was deposited back onto her bed, and Aveline moved to grab clean bandages from a pile that had taken over the writing desk.   
“Yeah, well you try having every damn move you make signed off on and watched for two months. I couldn’t even take a piss without alerting half the Templar Order.”

She shed her robe and shirt with a sense of routine that hinted at these sorts of incidents being more than just a one-time show of willpower.

Aveline watched her unwrap the bandages and discard them, unaware of how quickly her face lost all color at the sight of the wound. It was bleeding profusely, so bruised it was nearly black against her white skin, scabbed and scarring in places where the cut was clean and still very much healing in the places where skin and flesh had been ripped open by the motion of the blade.

She was able to ignore the fact that Hesta’s ribs still protruded from above her hollowed stomach, that her wrists were frail and bony and the blue-violet lines of her veins were clearly visible.

Hesta, on the other hand, could not ignore the way the Guard-Captain’s battle-sure hands shook as she began to wrap the fresh bandages around her.

She hated every moment of it.

\---

The first time Fenris saw her outside her house, he did not recognize her.

Accompanied by Templars and leaning heavily on Cullen’s arm, she was small and frail and pale, her hair done too elaborately to feel hers, a scowl set so deep into her face that it was a wonder she could open her mouth to speak.

He found out later that she was named the Champion of Kirkwall on that day. The highest honor for a woman who avoided title and ceremony with far more vigilance than death-defying danger.

The irony was not lost on anyone who knew her.

\---

It took three whole months for her to be able to walk around without any assistance.

She alerted nobody. Varric merely found her sitting in his palatial suite in the Hanged Man one day, a half-full tankard of ale cupped between her hands and another sitting in front of his usual spot. Her eyes had dulled and smile was too hollow, frail hands peering out from oversized clothes, but he had never been more thankful.

“Hi,” she said.   
“Well if it isn’t the great Champion of Kirkwall, come to grace my humble suite with her oft-requested presence.”  
Hesta snorted, and Varric’s stomach unclenched at the sound. He sat down across from her as she drank.  
“Maker, would you believe I _missed_ this shit?”

\---

It was late at night that she returned to her home, walking slowly through the barely-repaired streets of the city that now called her Champion. The title felt odd in her mouth, but it was a fairly minimal punishment for her meddling, she thought.

Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like an honor coming from Meredith.

Hesta rounded the corner into the Hightown market, and then stopped. She couldn’t believe her eyes at first, but the white hair gave him away almost as fast as his fidgeting.  
“Well, well. Come to pay your respects to your Champion?”  
Fenris turned to her, having been loitering at her front door for the better part of the last half-hour. He looked her up and down, in disbelief that she was up on her feet, lucid and aware. He was grateful beyond words.

“Did you… want to come in?”  
“No, I - I should get back. I … thought you may want this.”  
Hesta was presented with a bottle of wine - not Aggregio, but something that sounded just as pretentious and owned-by-a-magister as the wine they had reserved for anniversaries and late nights talking by the fire.  
“Well, you’re not wrong. Thank you.” She took the bottle and cradled it in her arm while the other went to find her key. “Are you sure you don’t want to have a glass with me? It’s been a while.”

That it had, but Fenris shook his head.  
“No. You need to rest. There will be time later.”  
Hesta paused, but her smile didn’t falter.  
“Alright. You just let me know when. Good night.”

She walked inside as Fenris moved back in the direction of his own house.

The moment her door clicked shut, his hand went to his temple and he felt the burning in his eyes come on just slowly enough for him to suppress it. His breath hitched only once before he pulled himself together, and kept walking.

There would be time later. She was alive, and there would be time later.

He would ask for nothing more.

 


End file.
